Chuck Bowen

Matt Zoller Seitz

I think it’s easily one of the best shows of the year, and a major work by everyone involved, for reasons that I’ll allude to momentarily--though not in detail, because The Girlfriend Experience is actually four or five shows rolled into one, and a big part of its specialness resides in those moments where it morphs from one thing into another.

David Wiegand

The performances are extraordinary, in spite of the fact the characters are all very similar--detached from emotion, honesty, sadness, shame and even desire by the airlessness of contemporary life. ... The Girlfriend Experience is one of the best new series of the young year.

Liz Shannon Miller

There's plenty of plot to contend with, as she tries to balance multiple lives and multiple worlds. But this stark, frank look at a very real thing, that really happens all the time, does tough but oddly beautiful work with exposing this quite real ethos.

Diane Werts

This is a singular vision throughout, written and directed by the team of Lodge Kerrigan and Amy Seimetz. (She also plays Christine’s older sister.) Their intense focus draws a disquieting portrait of a peculiar personality.

Darren Franich

Riley Keough makes an intriguing figure, at once more empowered and more desperate than her cinema alter ego. I have no clue if this is a profound mediation on intimacy or a daylight-noir origin story for Basic Instinct, but I'm hooked. [1/8 Apr 2016, p.101]

Ken Tucker

Kenji Fujishima

The viewer’s feelings toward Christine and her behavior are likely to remain unresolved--but Kerrigan and Seimetz’s refusal to psychologically and morally pin her down is exactly what makes The Girlfriend Experience, in its pungently moody and disturbing way, ultimately difficult to shake off.

Sonia Saraiya

The Girlfriend Experience isn’t perfect. Christine’s motivations are sometimes opaque, and sometimes not; the plot is sometimes thrilling, and sometimes not. ... But it is riveting--and sexy--to watch Christine watch the rest of the world.

Tim Grierson

There are lots of juicy twists and some melodramatic intrigue, and Kerrigan and Seimetz execute them with nicely chilly precision. But The Girlfriend Experience is at its best when it puts aside plot machinations to deliver a sympathetic but clear-eyed portrait of a woman discovering herself.

Sophie Gilbert

Keough’s Christine is fascinatingly inscrutable, and the 26-year-old actress (Elvis’s granddaughter, incidentally) carries the series with her chilly poise and enigmatic composure. The show, written and directed by Amy Seimetz and Lodge Kerrigan, offers no exposition whatsoever, rather following Christine from scene to scene and only occasionally abandoning her when plot necessitates it.

James Poniewozik

Brian Tallerico

The Girlfriend Experience” allows for pauses that television (other than “Rectify”) often does not. Sometimes these pauses can be presented in a way that feels too self-aware, but it starts to become a show with its own voice around episode five.

Daniel D'Addario

The Girlfriend Experience intuitively grasps the manner in which constantly available information can transform lives. If it resembles any movie genres, it's the paranoid eavesdropping thrillers of the 1970s, like Klute and The Conversation.

Tim Goodman

Keough's outstanding performance makes the whole thing work, make no mistake. But Kerrigan, Seimetz and Meizler weave a visually evocative backdrop, using only natural light, location-based shooting and a color scheme that allows for the intimacy of the writing to come out and help shape things.

Michael Slezak

The Girlfriend Experience proves more interesting than engrossing, perhaps because there doesn’t seem to be a single character willing to raise his or her voice above library-corridor volume, connect in any way that’s not ultimately about money or power, or overtly express the possible negative side effects of selling your body for cash.

Bethonie Butler

Her initial escapades feel overwhelmingly dour, a byproduct of stilted, emotionless dialogue. Keough plays her role with an almost impenetrable detachment that frustrates at first, but feels necessary in retrospect. ... Things start to get more interesting when Christine learns that one of her wealthy clients has kicked the bucket and left her a large sum of money, setting off alarm bells for the client’s family.

Brian Lowry

At first, the show feels a trifle frustrating, inasmuch as Christine dives into this strange new world without divulging almost anything about who she is, or wants to be. ... Gradually, though, that becomes its own kind of mystery, and helps foster a pervasive sense of unease, one that makes this Experience feel far more ambitious than something like Showtime’s “The Secret Diary of a Call Girl.”

Alan Sepinwall

The Girlfriend Experience, which is so sedate, chilly, and light on incident that it would be unbearable to watch one episode a week (or, in its first weekend, two), with not enough of a hook to pull the viewer back for a new half-hour after a seven day break. Watched in chunks, though, it can be more absorbing, thanks to Riley Keough's lead performance as Christine Reade, a Chicago law student moonlighting as an escort, and thanks to the anthropological tone created by Amy Seimetz and Lodge Kerrigan, who co-write every episode and take turns directing them.